Week of August 9, 2015

At 445 miles, the Yukon River Quest in is the longest canoe and kayak race. If that’s not enough, the distance has to be covered in 84 hours. I read somewhere that adventures have now become races. There are fewer “firsts” to conquer. The highest mountains have been climbed. The globe has been circumnavigated – by plane, by all types of boats, even by exclusively human power. One dude literally ran around the world. But adventures – especially ones of endurance – are not about they take to complete.

Holland, an adventure writer from Alaska, has become one of my favorite writers since we started 1-2-3 Sports! She’s covered all sorts of endurance, adventure, and extreme sports, but she’d never experienced what she covered until taking on the Yukon River Quest with team of eight women this past spring. “I’d signed up to paddle the River Quest because I wanted to experience the world I so often wrote about. I wanted to see the midnight sun set, and then rise again, on an empty stretch of wild river. I wanted to know what it felt like to hallucinate from exhaustion. I wanted to push my body to a point where I didn’t recognize it anymore. Most of all, I wanted to know: Could I do it?”